Onus now on Scottish government to establish a judicial inquiry

[The letter from Benedict Birnberg that follows was published in The London Review of Books on this date in 2009:]

As a partner of Gareth Peirce until my retirement may I add a sequel to her penetrating analysis of the al-Megrahi case (LRB, 24 Sepember). First, to point out that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) after an investigation lasting over three years referred his conviction to the Scottish court of appeal in June 2007; its statement of referral extended to more than 800 pages with 13 volumes of appendices. It is that appeal which, as Gareth Peirce says, al-Megrahi abandoned before his release and repatriation to Libya, thus denying the court the opportunity to consider the case, even though the SCCRC stated in its press release: ‘based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court ... the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.’ Why did al-Megrahi withdraw his appeal? Was it because he was put under pressure to secure his release on compassionate grounds? Or was it voluntarily done because he lacked confidence in the impartiality of the court? Whatever the truth may be, the onus now rests on the Scottish government to establish a public judicial inquiry, so that the case so painstakingly prepared by the SCCRC does not go by default.

Second, to add to the suspicions Peirce’s article exposes, it needs to be said that the Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill’s decision has unleashed a hysterical torrent of vilification, not least in the US where many of the relatives of the Lockerbie victims are convinced of al-Megrahi’s guilt. We have witnessed a campaign of denigration on which even Obama, Hillary Clinton and the late Edward Kennedy have bestowed their benediction. On this side of the Atlantic too the irrational commentators abound. The overwhelming weight of media comment has been hostile to al-Megrahi. On 3 September the Guardian carried a long article by Malcolm Rifkind, the former foreign secretary and a prominent Scottish lawyer, headed ‘Megrahi’s return has been a sorry, cocked-up conspiracy’: it failed even to mention the SCCRC reference. Even pillars of the human rights establishment, such as Geoffrey Robertson, have shouted themselves hoarse: ‘We should be ashamed that this has happened’ (Guardian, 22 August) and ‘Megrahi should never have been freed: the result is a triumph for state terrorism and a worldwide boost for the death penalty’ (Independent, 2 September).

Yet, when al-Megrahi releases part of the SCCRC case on the internet, his declared aim being to clear his name and ostensibly to prove his innocence, pat comes the Scottish lord advocate (Scotland’s chief prosecutor) joining relatives of the victims convinced of his guilt to denounce him for his ‘media campaign’. Meanwhile pleas from those who, like Dr Jim Swire, believe justice has not been done and who, for the sake of the memory of the victims as much as al-Megrahi, wish there to be a genuine and far-reaching inquiry, fall on deaf ears.

UK authorities have known for 20 years Megrahi was innocent

On this date in 2009 former ambassador Craig Murray wrote this on his blog:

“As I have previously stated, I can affirm that the FCO and MI6 knew that al-Megrahi was not the Lockerbie bomber.

“I strongly recommend that you read this devastating article by the great lawyer Gareth Peirce, in the London Review of Books. Virtually every paragraph provides information which in itself demolishes the conviction. The totality of the information Peirce gives is a quite stunning picture of not accidental but deliberate miscarriage of justice.”

He then quotes at length from Gareth Peirce’s The Framing of al-Megrahi.

What follows is from another of Mr Murray’s blogposts:

“The information on Lockerbie published in today’s Daily Mail from an Iranian defector, matches precisely what I was shown in a secret intelligence report in the FCO just around the time of the first Iraq war – that a Syrian terrorist group was responsible acting on behalf of Iran.  It was decided that this would be kept under wraps because the West needed Iran and Syria’s quiescence in the attack on Iraq.

“I was at the time Head of Maritime Section in the FCO’s Aviation and Maritime Department. I was shown the report by the Head of the Aviation Section, who was deeply troubled by it.

“The UK authorities have known for over 20 years that Megrahi was innocent. The key witness, a Maltese shopkeeper named Tony Gauci, was paid a total of US $7 million for his evidence by the CIA, and was able to adopt a life of luxury that continues to this day. The initial $2 million payment has become public knowledge but that was only the first instalment.  This was not an over-eagerness to convict the man the CIA believed responsible; this was a deliberate perversion of justice to move the spotlight from Iran and Syria to clear the way diplomatically for war in Iraq.

“It will of course be argued, probably correctly, that now Syria and Iran are the western targets, it is in the interests of the CIA for the true story to come out,  (minus of course their involvement in perverting the course of justice).  That is why we now hear it was Syria and Iran.  But it so happens that is in fact the truth.  Even the security services and government can tell the truth, when the moment comes that the truth rather than a deceit happens to be a tactical advantage to them.”

Never been a proper explanation

[What follows is the text of an article published in The Times on this date in 2009:]

An independent inquiry into the Lockerbie bombing was called for last night by a leading human rights lawyer.

Gareth Peirce, who has represented a string of high-profile victims of miscarriage of justice, said that the forensic evidence on which the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, was convicted was flawed.

The finding itself was “very, very worrying” and based the same kind of discredited forensic science that was at the heart of several notable miscarriages of justice in the ‘70s and ‘80s, she said.

“The [Lockerbie] case was founded on twin pillars: one, that al-Megrahi was linked to a charred fragment of a bomb timer; and second, his identification was ‘claimed’ by a man who could not be sure of his evidence.

“Has everyone forgotten the lessions learned of flawed scientified evidence and identification?

“The point being made by the families over 20 years is that they want to know the cause of the Lockerbie diaster. And at every turn, limitations have been put on their ability to discover it.”

Ms Peirce, who in a career spanning 30 years has acted for the Guildford Four, Birmingham Six and families of the Marchioness river boat disaster, was speaking at a special event in London attended by campaigners and experts including Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was among the 270 killed when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie.

She said that there had been a Fatal Accident Inquiry in [1990/91], which was limited to the immediate cause of the explosion so as not to prejudice future prosecutions, she said.

Some 15 years later there was the prosecution in the Hague of two Libyans, where the family could only be present and observe. But there had never been a “proper explanation of what they want to hear.”

But a UN assessor appointed to the trial had been scathing of the judges’ verdict, she added, and of the “atmosphere of political interference that permeated the trial”.

His long-awaited appeal would have confirmed his innocence

[What follows is an extract from an article by John Pilger that was published on the Information Clearing House website on this date in 2011:]

Gone from the Murdoch press are pejorative "insurgents". The action in Libya, says The Times, is "a revolution... as revolutions used to be". That it is a coup by a gang of Muammar Gaddafi's ex cronies and spooks in collusion with Nato is hardly news. The self-appointed "rebel leader", Mustafa Abdul Jalil, was Gaddafi's feared justice minister. The CIA runs or bankrolls most of the rest, including America's old friends, the Mujadeen Islamists who spawned al-Qaeda.

 

They told journalists what they needed to know: that Gaddafi was about to commit "genocide", of which there was no evidence, unlike the abundant evidence of "rebel" massacres of black African workers falsely accused of being mercenaries. European bankers' secret transfer of the Central Bank of Libya from Tripoli to "rebel" Benghazi by European bankers in order to control the country's oil billions was an epic heist of little interest.

The entirely predictable indictment of Gaddafi before the "international court" at The Hague evokes the charade of the dying "Lockerbie bomber", Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, whose "heinous crime" has been deployed to promote the west's ambitions in Libya. In 2009, al-Megrahi was sent back to Libya by the Scottish authorities not for compassionate reasons, as reported, but because his long-awaited appeal would have confirmed his innocence and described how he was framed by the Thatcher government, as the late Paul Foot's landmark expose revealed. As an antidote to the current propaganda, I urge you to read a forensic demolition of al-Megrahi's "guilt" and its political meaning in Dispatches from the Dark Side: on torture and the death of justice (Verso) by the distinguished human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce.

Feraday’s legacy

[On this date in 2005 Hassan Assali’s explosives conviction was quashed by the English Court of Appeal. His conviction in 1985 was founded on evidence given by Allen Feraday. What follows is a comment that appeared during the Zeist trial on the website edited by Ian Ferguson and me:]

As one of the Crown's key witnesses gave his testimony this week in Camp Zeist at the trial of the two Libyans accused of the bombing of Pan Am 103, one man, Hassan Assali watched news reports with interest as Allen Feraday took the witness stand.

Assali, 48, born in Libya but who has lived in the United Kingdom since 1965, was convicted in 1985 and sentenced to nine years. He was charged under the 1883 Explosives Substances Act, namely making electronic timers.

The Crown's case against Assali depended largely on the evidence of one man, Allen Feraday. Feraday concluded that the timers in question had only one purpose, to trigger bombs.

While in Prison Assali, met John Berry, who had also been convicted of selling timers and the man responsible for leading the Crown evidence against Berry was once again, Feraday. Again Feraday contended that the timers sold by Berry could have only one use, terrorist bombs.

With Assali's help Berry successfully appealed his conviction, using the services of a leading forensic expert and former British Army electronic warfare officer, Owen Lewis.

Assali's case is currently before the [English] Criminal Cases Review Commission, the CCRC. It has been there since 1997. Assali believes that his case might be delayed deliberately, as he stated to the Home Secretary, Jack Straw in a fax in February 1999: "I feel that my case is being neglected or put on the back burner for political reasons."

Assali believes that if his case is overturned on appeal during the Lockerbie trial it will be a further huge blow to Feraday's credibility and ultimately the Crown's case against the Libyans.

There is no doubt that a number of highly qualified forensic scientists do not care for the highly "opinionated" type of testimony, which is a hall mark of many of Feraday's cases.

He has been known, especially in cases involving timers to state in one case that the absence of a safety device makes it suitable for terrorists and then in another claim that the presence of a safety device proves the same, granted that the devices were different, but it is the most emphatic way in which he testifies that his opinions are "facts", that worries forensic scientists and defence lawyers.

In his report on Feraday's evidence in the Assali case, Owen Lewis states, "It is my view that Mr. Feraday's firm and unwavering assertion that the timing devices in the Assali case were made for and could have no other purpose than the triggering of IED's is most seriously flawed, to the point that a conviction which relied on such testimony must be open to grave doubt."

A host of other scientists, all with vastly more qualifications than Feraday concurred with Owen Lewis.

A report by Michael Moyes, a highly qualified electronics engineer and former Squadron Leader in the RAF, concluded that "there is no evidence that we are aware that the timers of this type have ever been found to be used for terrorist purposes. Moreover the design is not suited to that application."

Moyes was also struck by the similarity in the Berry and Assali case, in terms of the Feraday evidence.

In setting aside Berry's conviction in the appeal Court, Lord Justice Taylor described Feraday's evidence as "dogmatic".

This week in the Lockerbie trial, Feraday exhibited that same attitude when questioned by Richard Keen QC.

Keen asked Feraday about Lord Justice Taylor's remarks on his evidence, but Feraday, dogmatically, said he stands by his evidence in the Berry case.

He was further challenged over making contemporaneous notes on items of evidence he examined. Asked if he was certain that he had made those notes at the time, he said yes. When shown the official police log book which showed that some of the items Feraday had claimed to have examined had in actual fact been destroyed or returned to their owner before he claimed to examined them, his response, true to his dogmatic evidence was the police logs were wrong.

Under cross-examination though, it did become clear that Feraday completed a report for John Orr who was leading the police Lockerbie investigation and in that report he stated he was,  "Completely satisfied that the Lockerbie bomb had been contained inside a white Toshiba RT 8016 or 8026 radio-cassette player", and not, as he now testifies, "inside a black Toshiba RT SF 16 model."

As recently as May [2000], the leading civil liberties solicitor, Ms Gareth Peirce, told the Irish Times that the Lockerbie trial should be viewed with a questioning eye as lessons learned from other cases showed that scientific conclusions were not always what they seemed.

Speaking in Dublin Castle at an international conference on forensic science, Ms Peirce said she observed with interest the opening of the Lockerbie trial and some of the circumstances which, she said, had in the view of the prosecution dramatically affected the case.

She asked herself questions particularly relating to circuit boards which featured in the Lockerbie case and also in a case that she took on behalf of Mr. Danny McNamee, whose conviction for conspiracy to cause explosions in connection with the Hyde Park bombings (another case in which Feraday testified) was eventually quashed. She asked herself whether the same procedures were involved.

Danny McNamee may be the most recent Feraday case to be overturned, Hassan Assali believes his case will be the next.

[RB: As mentioned above, Assali’s conviction was quashed on 19 July 2005. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, stated that Allen Feraday “should not be allowed to present himself as an expert in the field of electronics”.]

UK Court quest for Lockerbie facts

[This is the heading over an item dated 14 May 1998 on The Pan Am 103 Crash Website. The subheading reads “Ian Black on a mother's search for truth behind PanAm tragedy” which is a strong indication that the article was published in The Guardian, though I can find no trace of it on the newspaper’s website. It reads as follows:]

The mother of a British victim of the Lockerbie disaster is going to the High Court after failing to force an inquest to reveal more about the case.

Nearly 10 years after PanAm flight 103 exploded, killing 270 people, Elizabeth Wright, a London psychiatrist, is seeking judicial review of the decision of a Sussex coroner that he could not conduct an inquest on her son Andrew.

Andrew Gillies-Wright, then 24, was flying to New York for Christmas when he died on December 21, 1988. He was cremated and his ashes interred in South Lancing, West Sussex. Dr Wright, like other Lockerbie relatives seeking movement after years of impasse, agreed to act as a test case, but was told "the lawfully cremated remains of a person (that is that person's ashes) do not constitute 'a body' for the purpose of... jurisdiction."

The British families want an inquest to raise questions which were not answered in the Scottish fatal accident inquiry in Dumfries.Those include events on the ground after the incident, whether intelligence agencies had warned of an attack, and how it was that initial suspicions that Iran, Syria or Palestinians were responsible gave way to charges against Libya.

Gareth Peirce, Dr Wright's solicitor, said: "There is potentially clear and compelling evidence setting out a scenario so different from the one that has been officially presented that it's a continuing national and international disgrace that it remains hidden, and that it falls to the families of the victims to unravel it."

Behind the legal arguments being prepared by Ms Peirce and Michael Mansfield, QC, lies the pain of bereaved families whose hope of seeing justice is diminishing almost a decade after the crime. "It shows what sort of position we find ourselves in when we have to discuss whether a cremated human being is a body," said Pam Dix, spokesperson for UK Families Flight 103.

She added: "We were not satisfied with the fatal accident inquiry, and we see the inquest as one way to further our quest to find out exactly what happened... We want information, not blame.

"We know intelligence won't be openly discussed in any court, but we would like to see how far we could go in getting these matters aired."

Jim Swire, whose daughter, Flora, died in the bombing, returned from Libya last month with "strong assurances" that the suspects would be handed over for trial in a neutral country. He accused the Government of "following slavishly in America's slipstream", despite the comment by Nelson Mandela that no nation should be "complainant, prosecutor and judge".

Roger Stone, the West Sussex coroner, wrote after refusing an inquest on Mr Gillies-Wright: "I hope, given time, that Dr Wright and other members of the family will find it possible to come to terms with their son's tragic death and take comfort from the loving memories they no doubt hold of him."

[RB: If a judicial review was in fact applied for (on which I can find no information) it clearly did not succeed.]

A highly personal smear campaign

[What follows is the text of an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2009:]

Lockerbie doubters branded ‘Holocaust deniers’

[This is the headline over a report in today's Scottish edition of The Sunday Times. It reads as follows:]

A representative of families of American victims of the Lockerbie disaster has likened those questioning the guilt of the convicted Libyan bomber to “Holocaust deniers”.

Frank Duggan, an official spokesman for Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, described those who believe Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi is innocent as a “shameless band of conspiracy mavens”.

Those criticised include Christine Grahame, the nationalist MSP, her researcher Mark Hirst, Robert Black, the Edinburgh-based legal expert who helped broker Megrahi’s trial in the Netherlands and Gareth Peirce, the London-based human rights lawyer.

In an email sent to Richard Marquise, a former FBI official who headed the investigation, Duggan said Grahame, Hirst, Black and Peirce were “no worse than Holocaust deniers who will not accept the facts before their faces”.

Grahame, who believes that Iran, not Libya, was behind the 1988 bombing, which claimed 270 lives, said Duggan’s comments were ludicrous. “My father and the fathers and grandfathers of many of the other people who are seeking the truth about who attacked Pan Am 103 were fighting the perpetrators of the Holocaust for three years before the US saw fit to get involved,” she said.

Hirst accused Duggan of a “highly personal” smear campaign against those who doubted the safety of Megrahi’s conviction.

The row reflects anger among the families of the American victims at the decision by Kenny MacAskill, the justice minister, to free Megrahi on compassionate grounds. Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer, has outlived his three-month prognosis. Last week, MacAskill defended his decision to a Holyrood inquiry into the handling of Megrahi’s release, insisting that the medical advice was “quite clear”.

US intelligence files published last week claim Megrahi was involved in buying and developing chemical weapons for Libya.

Black declined to comment and Peirce was unavailable for comment.

[I declined to comment since I was unwilling to descend into the gutter with Mr Duggan.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission which, on six grounds, found that Mr Megrahi's conviction may have amounted to a miscarriage of justice, no better than Holocaust deniers, forsooth!

According to The Chambers Dictionary "maven" or "mavin" is US slang, from Yiddish, for pundit or expert.

The full e-mail exchange between Mr Duggan, Richard Marquise and Mr Hirst can be read here.

An interesting commentary (in German) on The Sunday Times article can be found on the Austrian Wings website. A more general article on the Lockerbie affair on the same website by Editor in Chief Patrick Radosta can be read here.]

“It is not difficult to achieve a conviction of the innocent"

[What follows is the text of an article by Steve James that was published on the World Socialist Web Site on this date in 2009:]

Leading British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce has stated that, in her opinion Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the only man accused and convicted of the 1988 bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was framed.

Pierce has a long track record of defending those caught in the British legal system’s most notorious miscarriages of justice. Her clients have included the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and Judith Ward, all of whom were Irish people accused and wrongly convicted of IRA bomb attacks in the 1970s. More recently Peirce has taken up a number of high profile cases of individuals accused in the so-called “war on terror”, including the Tipton Three and Moazam Begg, held illegally by the US government in Guantánamo Bay. She has represented the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, an innocent man shot dead by British police in Stockwell underground station in 2005.

Writing in the September edition of the London Review of Books, Peirce, of the law firm headed by Benedict Birnberg, summarises some of the most concerning, and well known, aspects of the entire Lockerbie disaster in which 270 people died, and the subsequent investigation.

She points to the advance warnings of an attack on Pan Am flights from London, the role of the FBI and others who flooded the crash site, the lack of security on the site and tampered evidence, including moved bodies. She notes the initial trajectory of the investigation, which pointed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) acting on behalf of Iran having used a barometric bomb to bring down the 747. She also notes that a barometric bomb, one triggered by changes in air pressure, would have exploded only after PA 103 reached a certain height—some 38 minutes into the flight from Heathrow—precisely when the plane disintegrated.

She reviews the subsequent change in focus from Syria and Iran to Libya, which was in line with US foreign policy objectives at the time. Firstly, then US President George Bush, senior, instructed then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to keep the Lockerbie investigation “low key” to assist hostage negotiations underway in Beirut. As a result, rather than a judicial inquiry and prosecution, a Fatal Accident Inquiry (FAI) with no powers of subpoena was held.

Then, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991, Iran and Syria both assisted the US invasion of Iraq. It was at this time that the focus of the Lockerbie investigation was shifted. Vincent Cannistraro, the architect of the Reagan administration’s CIA campaign of destabilisation against the Libyan government of Colonel Muammar Gadhaffi, was brought out of retirement to head the new line of investigation.

Peirce writes, “It is not difficult to achieve a conviction of the innocent. Over many decades several common factors have been identified, and the majority of them are present, centre stage, in this case: achieving the cooperation of witnesses by means of a combination of inducements and fear of the alternative (the tried and tested method of obtaining evidence for the prosecution on which many US cases rely); the provision of factual information by scientists where there is no proper basis for it (a recurrent theme in UK convictions as well as in the US); reliance on ‘identification’ evidence which is no such thing. Add to that the political will to achieve a prosecution, and the rest is easy”.

Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi and his co-accused, Llamen Khalifa Fhimah, were handed over by the Libyan government in 1999. The trial opened at a converted US airbase in the Netherlands in 2000. The indictment against Megrahi read that an MST 13 bomb timer was made in Switzerland, by MEBO AG, and sold exclusively to Libya. Identification of the timer rested on the efforts of Thomas Hayes and Alan Feraday of the Royal Armament and Development Establishment (RARDE), along with Thomas Thurman of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

In 1997, following an investigation by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, Thurman was barred from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich described Thurman as “circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in...therefore fabricating evidence”.

Thomas Hayes claimed that on May 12, 1989, he found a fragment of circuit board in the collar of a shirt later traced to a Maltese shop. The fragment itself had been found in January 1989 by British police investigating the crash site.

Peirce states, “Even if one knew nothing of the devastating findings of the public inquiry in the early 1990s into the false science that convicted the Maguire Seven or of the succession of thunderous judgments in the Court of Appeal in case after case in which RARDE scientists had provided the basis for wrongful convictions, Hayes’s key evidence in this case on the key fragment should be viewed as disgraceful”.

“Hayes”, Peirce continues, “played his part in the most notorious of all, endorsing the finding of an explosive trace that was never there, and speculating that a piece of chalk mentioned to the police by Vincent Maguire, aged 16, and a candle by Patrick Maguire, aged 13, ‘fitted the description better’ of a stick of gelignite wrapped in white paper”.

Hayes’s information regarding this crucial piece of Lockerbie evidence was also flawed. Despite having carefully documented every other piece of evidence he found, Hayes had made no drawing of this particular item and had not assigned it a reference number on discovery. He had not carried out a test for explosives. Hayes said he had “no idea” when the pagination of his notes recording findings had been altered to include an additional page, and it was an “unfathomable mystery” as to why the alterations should have occurred.

Following an investigation into RARDE by Sir John May, Hayes resigned and is now reported to be working as a chiropodist.

Pierce then turns to the visual identification of Megrahi.

“Even if the science that convicted al-Megrahi had not offended against every minimum standard, then the second pillar of the prosecution case, his identification by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, would remain spectacular in its noncompliance with any safeguard”.

Pierce notes the numerous failings in the evidence provided by Gauci, his initial identification of Abu Talb, of the PFLP-GC, and reiterates the suggestion that Gauci was “handsomely rewarded” for his services.

She describes the verdict delivered in 2001 by three experienced judges, upheld later by five appeal court judges as “profoundly shocking”, and makes the following devastating assessment:

“Al-Megrahi’s trial constituted a unique legal construct, engineered to achieve a political rapprochement, but its content was so manipulated that in reality there was only ever an illusion of a trial”.

Peirce concludes that there is “pressing need to investigate in details how it has come about that there has been a form of death in this case—the death of justice—and who should be found responsible”.

Subsequent to Peirce’s comments, more revelations have emerged about the crucial piece of MST 13 circuit board. Following a Freedom of Information request raised by Scottish Nationalist Member of the Scottish Parliament Christine Grahame, the Scottish Crown Office has confirmed that evidence item PT-35, the piece of circuit board found by Hayes, was taken for examination to both Germany and the US. Graham claimed that this was done with the knowledge of the then chief prosecutor, Lord Fraser of Carmylie, who recently told a Dutch television company that he was unaware of the fragment’s movements.

Megrahi was released by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny Macaskill in August, allegedly on humanitarian grounds. It occurred at a time when the Libyan government had made clear that, if the terminally ill Megrahi had been allowed to die in Greenock prison, British oil contracts would have been imperilled. In addition, Megrahi had agreed to drop a long delayed appeal against his conviction in order to secure his release.

The release triggered outrage from the US in particular and was attacked by President Barack Obama, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, the head of the FBI, and the US Joint Chief of Staff amongst many. Commentary went as far as suggesting that the so-called “special relationship” between British and US imperialism, and Scotland in particular, was imperiled.

All this has been forgotten. On September 21, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly informed the world that the US had “deep abiding ties with Scotland”. Kelly continued, “We are very close allies, and I don’t think we’re looking to punish anybody per se. There’s no tit for tat here”.

Three weeks later, speaking before a meeting with UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Clinton stated, “I have a special relationship with the prime minister. And of course, I think it can’t be said often enough, we have a special relationship between our countries”.

What was said between the two regarding Lockerbie is not clear, but the meeting came immediately prior to the British government’s decision to send an additional 500 troops to Afghanistan. Brown has subsequently ruled out a public inquiry into the bombing, while the Scottish government have denied they had the power to hold an authoritative inquiry in the first place.

Clinton also called in the Libyan government, speaking for 15 minutes en route to Egypt with Libyan Foreign Minister and former intelligence chief Musa Kusa. According to US Assistant Secretary Philip Crowley, the two talked of “Sudan, Darfur, cooperation about terrorism and the possibility of advancing our relationship”.

Crowley claimed that Megrahi was not discussed, lamely stating that “the Libyans understand our concerns about Megrahi very, very well”.